Why I didn’t use to mind not seeing myself in books

 

I’m not talking about universal human experiences like falling in love, being awkward at high school, or you know… saving the world. I’m talking about what everyone is talking about, seeing our cultural identities in the literature we read.

I understand why people say why should they care. As long as they’re great books, what’s the problem?

Let’s get my stance on diversity in lit out of the way

• There is a problem, when, say PoC have written stories, and then another author is picked over them to write those stories, which are about PoC’s experiences.
• I’m okay with a white, cishet author writing about characters that aren’t white and cishet. There is a difference between merely including these characters, which is always okay, and making the story about them and their culture, which is where they should procceed with caution.
• It is appropiation, when they pick and change what suits them about cultures to write their book, but when care has been put and a culture is depicted respectfully, then I don’t see a problem with that book.
• We can acknowledge a book being problematic and still enjoy it.
• I believe in calling out people, including authors when they say something that can hurt other people.
• However I don’t like seeing people subtweeting and talking behind other bloggers’ back when they make a mistake, instead of just approaching the person and explaining what they did wrong.
• I believe #KeepYaKind is bullshit, but also consider that if we want to bulldoze our way to what we want, we’ll have to acknowledge we’ll lose friends, and other important people in this community that only made mistakes. They would never be racist, and if they were approached with respect to deal with problems, they would, and have gone out of their way to fix it.

Now that that’s out of the way, I want to share my own experience.

 

How I started reading

Or better yet, what type of books. Well, books published in the US translated into spanish, of course. And when I discovered that I could read more books if I read them in english, I started doing that. So, so far so good.

Now, however you feel about diversity, you can’t deny most of the protagonists are fair-skinned, but even more important, actually hail from the US. Since the authors do too. And it’s alright. White, US authors, writing about white, US characters*. (I’ll return to this later)

 

Why I didn’t mind

I read book after book, enjoying them, and falling in love with them, while hating others. And I never, not in one moment stop to think.

Hey, but… these girls are all white.

Like some people say, ‘I didn’t see color’.

And I was wrong.

 

A little story

Back when I played with Barbies and Bratz, and MyScene’s, I would go to the toy store, and stand in front of the rows and rows of dolls, pondering which to get.

In spite of my mom’s varied suggestions, and my small age, I was aware of what I was doing. I was perfectly aware that I never picked dolls with anything but wite skin. I never picked the black Barbie doll. Never. I never owned one.

Literally, if I had this:

I never chose the black Barbie, which is a damn shame because I actuallly like that blue dress better!

And look here, it wasn’t because my parents didn’t buy them for me. It was me who didn’t want them. Yeah, I was a little racist idiot without me even knowing about it.

 

In my culture, seeing brown skin is common place, as it is to see fair skin. Darker complexions are not discriminated, but… there are stigmas, you know.

So, all of these things, eventually contributed for me to be conditioned in a certain way:

The fairer the skin, the more attractive

Can you see the dangerous thought  construction now?

I didn’t mind color in books because since all of the main characters were white, I considered them perfect and attractive, how heroes should be.

How I wanted to be.

Funny fact: My skin is weird. My face is white, but my arms are more than a few shades darker than it, and I’ve always hated that my arms aren’t as white as my face.

 

Bottom line

What I wanted to get across, is that our environment is all telling us how things should be. How things have been for a long time. And it’s the wrong way.

Because people who speak other languages, who have different cultures and different skin color are human too. We don’t deserve to be erased. To be brainwashed into thinking how we are is wrong.

 

Okay, I see your point, but… why should the US fix your problems? Why don’t you go to your country and write your own damn book?

Tou-fucking-ché

But it’s a matter of being responsible. We’re not trying to kid anyone here. We know who controls the literature that is published all over the world. We read local books from time to time but there’s a reason that in spite of hailing from different countries, everyone in the book community has come together to speak in english to share our love for books. That should be proof enough of english publishers’ influence.

Moreover, the US isn’t all white people. In fact,  a ‘true american’, isn’t white skin, blonde hair. A true american is indigenous, because those are the people who were first here. Whose land this is. So by refusing to include characters that reflect the diversity we encounter in the real world, you’re erasing those people from the real world.

These people have been being erased for a long time.

So for those who blatantly refuse to be okay with that diversity translating to literature, don’t be an asshole. 

 

 

I hate having been conditioned to thinking my identity wasn’t important, or valuable

For a long time, I tried to ‘US-ize’ myself. (I refuse to say americanize because I’m already american. If you live in America, it stands to reason you’re american. And, newsflash, Ecuador, is located in the american continent. US is NOT America.) So that’s why I fully support publishing books with characters form diverse backgrounds, and having diverse authors write them too.

 

I want to know, have you gone through something similar? Did you start out not realizing there was a problem with diversity and then suddenly you found yourself wondering which of those books you’d read could have been incredibly racist without you having noticed?

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